Cronenburg's THE BROOD is disturbing. The kill scenes actually had my pulse racing a bit, it has pretty much the most disturbing death scene I've seen. the weird classical soundtrack gives it an extra creepy atmosphere. although the ending is slightly far-fetched.

I was thinking that... then I remembered there's a kind of oddball comedy streak running through half the film. but i've also seen some scenes that they weren't allowed to put in the final cut (all from the scene where they torture the 2 girls in the wood area) that would've made it much more disturbing. I think you can see them as extras on one one of the DVD versions...

Terry Gilliam's Tideland. It's not disturbingly gory, but it literally took me a week of walking around in a daze to process it. It is a about a young girl whose mother is a bipolar drug addict and whose father is a musician and addict. When her mother dies, she and her father go to his grandmother's house in the middle of nowhere in Kansas. They plan to fix up the house, which has been long abandoned, but the father dies of a drug overdose, leaving the girl on her own with her toys (three doll heads that begin to talk to her). Very messed up things happen in the movie. It's not a horror movie, and the performances are excellent, but I don't think I could ever watch it again because it disturbed me so greatly. I realize you're probably looking for horror movies, but this one disturbed me far more than any horror movie. The things the story puts this little girl through are horrific. I'm glad I saw it, because it is very well done, but yeesh.

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"They tap dance not, neither do they fart." --Greensleeves, on the Fig Men of the Imagination, in "Twice Upon a Time."

Come on guys some of these picks are slightly disturbing at best. Here are my choices for pure soul crushing, make you feel weird even for watching films. I put them in

A Serbian Film -IMO the granddaddy of them all. Pushes every boundary and taboo I can think of while still being an engaging and entertaining horror film. Made me feel dirty for days after watching.

The Girl Next Door This may be even more disturbing than serbian film due to the fact that its based on a true story. A terrifying story of child abuse that goes really far in terms of pushing boundaries. The young cast and high production values make this much more disturbing than crap like August Underground. While I might rewatch Serbian Film due to its entertainment value I will never come back to this harrowing film.

William Lustig's Maniac-The lack of sympathetic characters and the sadistic quality of the violence makes this a deeply disturbing film IMO. Henry potrait of a serial killer comes close but that film has moments of comedy that make it watchable.

The Men Behind the Sun films-I have not seen all of these but from what I have seen I would say they definitely belong on this list. Chronicling some of the most reprehensible thing's done by the Japanese during the second world war these films pull no punches in showing you torture, desperation and wide scale murder. In these film's I have seen a baby pulled out of a pregnant women with a bayonet (Men Behind the Sun 4), killing of a cat (the first one) and many more ridiculously disturbing images. Supposedly the first one utilized real human body parts for the special effects. Here is a bit of trivia I found on imdb about the making of the first film.

"The young woman who is subjected to the lengthy and torturous experiment involving frostbite is actually director Mou's niece. She was the only person he could find willing to play the disturbing and physically demanding role which involved holding a pair of real corpse arms which were frozen for real in the subzero Manchurian temperatures.She nearly contacted frostbite herself filming it"

I strongly second A Serbian Film. Maybe the most obvious choice as far as disturbing goes, but it desreves it. I mentioned this before, but the film was so incredibly well made (cinematography, soundtrack, etc.) that the really sick parts hit you ten times as hard. But in a weird way, it wasn't the really over the top disgusting stuff that got to me, it was the more subtle parts that unnerved me very deeply. For instance, the scene where Milos is in that little girl's granmothers house and she's offering her granddaughter to him. Something about the way she looks and delivers her lines......I mean s**t! Edit: I forgot about the short film Cutting Moments. Pretty messed up.

« Last Edit: September 30, 2012, 07:17:04 PM by voltron »

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"Nothin' out there but God's little creatures - more scared of you than you are of them" - Warren, "Just Before Dawn"

VERY bad acting, and some of the scenes are weak, but the fact that they use REAL footage of animal cruelty, the behaviour of the main characters, and the final death and rape scenes, as well as some scenes of sexual torture, just make this disturbing.